The first step is to find an item which has jigglebones whose physics will do for what I want to do (for a full list of TF2 items which use jigglebones, you can go here: http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Jigglebone ). In my case, I thought the Holy Mackerel would do, so I imported that.

You then need to lock and zero the item to the bone on the character which is the direct parent of the one(s) you want jiggleboned. Here, I want to jigglebone the finger, so I need to lock and zero the Mackerel to the Heavy's hand. It's also important to rotate the item in an angle that matches the finger, since zeroing didn't do that by itself:http://i.imgur.com/I6AskWL.jpg

You then need to "bake" the jigglebones. You do that by right-clicking the item's animation set, and going to Utilities > Bake Procedural Bones:http://i.imgur.com/hZ6NjTW.jpg

You can now "constrain" the finger to the fish's jiggles. This is done by selecting the first jigglebone AND the first finger bone, in this order (that's very important. This is how SFM will know which bone will carry its rotation changes over to the other). Then, right-click either of the selected bones, and go to DAG Utlilities Menu > constrain_orient:http://i.imgur.com/0HLzAAi.jpg

If there's more than one set of bones to constrain together, do those as well. Here I also constrained the finger's second and third bones to the Mackerel's second and third jigglebones respectively. Once that's done, lock all the character's bones you constrained to the world by clicking their checkboxes. Right-click the character's animation set, go to Constraints > Remove Constraints:http://i.imgur.com/r0nXgLo.jpg

Can't get this to work for the life of me. Every time I lock the macral to the parent of the bone of I want to jiggle, the macral loses all of its jiggliness.. ive tried locking it both ways mackeral to bone and bone to macral... =-(

Can't get this to work for the life of me. Every time I lock the macral to the parent of the bone of I want to jiggle, the macral loses all of its jiggliness.. ive tried locking it both ways mackeral to bone and bone to macral... =-(

Drag the parent bone onto the mackerel's roottransform bone, select the mackerel, and apply the zero preset. You need to do this before baking the physics.

I followed the procedures you listed to a tee, yet every time I try to lock the bone I'm working with (the last procedure, locking the bone(s) I constrained to the world before removing the constraints) SFM will stop working and crash. I'm unsure what the cause is, I'm trying this process on a number of models and bones and the results seem to be the same. I'm going to continue trying, if you have any ideas/feedback as what may be causing the crashes(always when trying to select the bone after doing the constrain_orient) I'd greatly appreciate it.

Also, If you want to decompile a model and add the jigglebones yourself, you've first got to understand how to make and edit the models.-Autodesk has a student version of 3ds max that you can use for free[www.autodesk.com]-TheNewBoston has a good set of basic 3ds max tutorials-And the program Crowbar can decompile models once you're ready (look for an SMD importer for your 3ds version to get the decompiled model in to 3ds max)